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6062007

HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN !! ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

Well, the history exam was dreadful, so I thought I’d do something a little more lighthearted, and at the same time cover an area of new media I haven’t really looked at on this blog before: Internet culture.

You see, the Internet has its own culture. I’ll admit that I haven’t escaped its dreaded influence – for example, I know what “lol” means. Still, at least I’ve never played World of Warcraft, and I have never used exclamations like “w00t” or “pwned” in actual conversation, unlike certain nerds I could mention…

Internet culture involves the spreading of ideas, so that some things become famous online simply through word-of-mouth. A good example would be the way songs posted on the Internet become massively popular despite being virtually unknown offline, such as the hilarious “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny” by Lemon Demon and the awesome “Canon Rock” by JerryC. Also demonstrative of the power of Internet culture is the massive hype that surrounded Snakes on a Plane.

Another common element of Internet culture is “webspeak” or “MSNspeak” – dialects constructed from text messaging, “leet” hacker slang, computer codes such as binary and hex, fake html tags (such as <irony></irony>), adoptions from foreign languages, and quotes from cult video games (“Where’s that DAMN fourth Chaos Emerald?”). Then of course there are smilies :-) and other emoticons ^_^ and ASCII art. Some of it can be quite hard to understand, too. Out of curiosity, I Googled for “dictionary internet slang”, and found that there are actually websites that exist purely to help parents figure out what exactly their kids are saying to one another online.

Heck, there’s even a “Hacker” (leet) version of Google. Well, that’s all I’ve got to say about computer culture. Crazy, huh? The Internet really is one weird creature, that’s for sure.